CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.

Barrels of whiskey and moonshine are traditionally labeled with X's (one X being weakest and three X's being strongest, as we learn in One-Letter Words: A Dictionary). But lesser-known is that coffee used to be roasted to a XXXX strength. Our vintage coffee ad is from c. 1890. The four X's on the vintage Coca Cola postcard below are, we think, unrelated.